When climate risk enters the household: Climate disasters and intimate partner emotional violence
- 1Faculty of Finance, City University of Macau, China
- 2Corresponding author.
Abstract
Climate disasters increasingly reach beyond damaged infrastructure and lost income, altering the conditions under which household relationships unfold. Emotional intimate partner violence ( E -IPV) is a less visible form of household risk because it operates through threats, humiliation, psychological abuse, and coercive pressure inside the household. Here, we combine DHS domestic-violence records from 15 low- and lower-middle-income countries during 2003–2010 with country-year disaster measures constructed from EM-DAT event records to estimate how four climate hazards, namely extreme temperature, drought, flood, and storm, are associated with women's reported histories of E -IPV by the time of interview. We find that all four hazards are positively associated with reporting such a history, with the flood measure showing the largest estimate. The associations for extreme temperature, drought, and flood extend to physical and sexual IPV, while the storm estimates differ across IPV types. The flood association remains visible in a local-flood specification using past-12-month E -IPV. We further show that climate risk operates through household conditions: polygyny, marital status, and child presence shape vulnerability, while household wealth, partner drinking, and women's work location point to plausible household mechanisms. These findings identify climate disasters as risks to household safety and suggest that IPV prevention should be integrated into climate adaptation and disaster-response systems.
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BibTeX
@article{chang2026when,
title = {{When climate risk enters the household: Climate disasters and intimate partner emotional violence}},
author = {Xiangxu Chang and Xuanyu Cai and Wenli Xu},
journal = {Climate Risk Management},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1016/j.crm.2026.100898},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2026.100898},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - When climate risk enters the household: Climate disasters and intimate partner emotional violence
AU - Xiangxu Chang
AU - Xuanyu Cai
AU - Wenli Xu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/30
JO - Climate Risk Management
DO - 10.1016/j.crm.2026.100898
UR - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2026.100898
AB - Climate disasters increasingly reach beyond damaged infrastructure and lost income, altering the conditions under which household relationships unfold. Emotional intimate partner violence ( E -IPV) is a less visible form of household risk because it operates through threats, humiliation, psychological abuse, and coercive pressure inside the household. Here, we combine DHS domestic-violence records from 15 low- and lower-middle-income countries during 2003–2010 with country-year disaster measures constructed from EM-DAT event records to estimate how four climate hazards, namely extreme temperature, drought, flood, and storm, are associated with women's reported histories of E -IPV by the time of interview. We find that all four hazards are positively associated with reporting such a history, with the flood measure showing the largest estimate. The associations for extreme temperature, drought, and flood extend to physical and sexual IPV, while the storm estimates differ across IPV types. The flood association remains visible in a local-flood specification using past-12-month E -IPV. We further show that climate risk operates through household conditions: polygyny, marital status, and child presence shape vulnerability, while household wealth, partner drinking, and women's work location point to plausible household mechanisms. These findings identify climate disasters as risks to household safety and suggest that IPV prevention should be integrated into climate adaptation and disaster-response systems.
SN - 2212-0963
ER -